Joseph Klibansky Official Website, Contemporary Artist

The Barcelona filmmaking collective Canada turn an innocent dessert into an erotic ideal in the third part of our #DefineBeauty series.

Sexual impulse is put under a retro-filtered microscope in Canada’s short, Crème Caramel. Giving the popular pudding top billing, the Barcelona director collective depict a portrait of desire for the latest in NOWNESS’ weekly series #DefineBeauty. Having shot music videos for Scissor Sisters and Phoenix, Canada’s Nicolás Méndez, Lope Serrano, Oscar Romagosa and Alba Barneda deconstructed the sensual yet somehow irreverent features of the female form. “When you are obsessed with someone, it’s not just with that someone—it’s with the shape of the hips, the color of the nipples, or the shade of her hair when she comes out of the shower,” says Serrano of their inspiration. “We were thinking of a metaphor that represents the heterosexual male view of the female body: something sweet, tender and beautiful—a crème caramel.” The directors captured the trembling dessert—which they insist is an aphrodisiac—alongside hyper-stylized visual motifs that include kaleidoscopic illustrations and 1970s records. While Serrano crafted the drawings featured in the short, a chance encounter with French band La Femme as he listened to the studio stereo resulted in the climactic soundtrack, “La Femme Ressort.” “When you’re making work based on visions of a woman’s body, you cannot lose your own desire, which is instinctively sexual,” says Serrano, who also cites Godard’s chapter for the 1969 multi-director feature Love and Anger as a reference. “But we’re not insisting on the simply erotic notion, it’s also anatomical: a wonderful succession of details.”